30 O'Reilly Titles Now Available as Ebook Bundles; Many In Kindle Store Later Today

As promised last month, O'Reilly has released 30 titles as DRM-free downloadable ebook bundles. The bundles include three ebook formats (EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket) for a single price -- at or below the book's cover price. And for a bit more than the cover price, you can get the print version too along with the ebook bundles.

Since we began selling PDFs directly some time ago, we've given those customers free updates to the PDFs to reflect published changes in the books; the same will apply to the ebook bundle, which will replace the PDF option on those titles. These files (like all our PDFs currently for sale) do not include any DRM, though we continue to experiment with custom watermarking options.

With these three formats, customers should be able to read the books with most current ebook software and devices, including Adobe Digital Editions, Kindle, Blackberries, and Sony Reader (Sony announced in May that EPUB support is forthcoming in a firmware update for their Reader).

Twelve of those 30 titles will also be available through the Kindle store later today are now available.

Ebook Bundles Now Available

The titles now available as ebook bundles are:

�� * Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide
�� * Subject to Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World
�� * Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management
�� * Wikipedia: The Missing Manual
�� * Facebook: The Missing Manual
�� * Windows Vista: The Missing Manual
�� * Designing Web Navigation
�� * Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3ed
�� * The Art of Agile Development
�� * Process Improvement Essentials
�� * Enterprise SOA
�� * Applied Software Project Management
�� * Practical Development Environments
�� * Security and Usability
�� * We the Media
�� * Devices of the Soul
�� * Digital Identity
�� * Database Nation
�� * Spam Kings
�� * Open Sources
�� * Open Sources 2.0
�� * Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
�� * Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing
�� * The Cathedral & the Bazaar
�� * Mind Performance Hacks
�� * Statistics Hacks
�� * Smart Home Hacks
�� * Wikipedia Reader's Guide: The Missing Manual
�� * Flex 3 Cookbook
�� * Painting the Web

Kindle Titles Available Later Today Now

These books should all be are now available from the Kindle store later today:

�� * Subject to Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World
�� * Wikipedia: The Missing Manual
�� * Facebook: The Missing Manual
�� * Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
�� * We the Media
�� * Devices of the Soul
�� * The Cathedral & the Bazaar
�� * Painting the Web
�� * Spam Kings
�� * Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing
�� * Wikipedia Reader's Guide: The Missing Manual
�� * Process Improvement Essentials

What's Missing on the Kindle

Of the 30 titles we've released as part of this ebook pilot, only 12 will be available right away are now available on the Kindle store. As we've mentioned before, the Kindle does not currently support some of the elements that are pretty critical to many of our books, including tables and monospaced fonts. Right now if you see a proper table in any Kindle book, it's actually just an image of the table -- which means it's neither searchable nor resizable, two key features in an ebook.

Because the bundles available from oreilly.com include PDFs that mirror the printed book, we felt comfortable including Mobipocket files for Kindle users in all 30, even though many include tables that will not properly display on the Kindle. Since Kindle store customers won't have the benefit of the PDF for reference, we're only including titles there that have had their tables converted to images -- an unfortunately arduous process that may take a few weeks for the remaining 18 titles. All 30 of the above titles will be available in the Kindle store within a few weeks (and customers who bought the bundle will receive updated Mobipocket versions for free as they become available).

We did work with Amazon to experiment using an alternative for rendering our books on the Kindle so they'd more closely match the printed layout (including tables and monospaced text). But that option involved Amazon converting our PDFs into their undocumented and opaque topaz file format -- a process that also undermined the searchability of the content. We look forward to seeing Amazon support real tables, monospaced fonts, and the EPUB format natively in the Kindle.

You can find more information about O'Reilly ebooks, including details on the different formats, at oreilly.com/ebooks. We welcome your feedback on our ebooks, and encourage you to tell Amazon that you want tables, monospaced fonts, and native EPUB supported on your Kindle.

http://toc.oreilly.com/2008/07/30-oreilly-titles-now-available
-as-ebook-bundles.html